The invention relate to a refrigerator.
It is known to dispose ice makers in the refrigeration compartment of refrigerators. In these cases ice makers are used which are filled with water and externally cooled, the water freezing from outside to inside and finally producing an ice cube. In addition, there are so-called clear ice makers in which a plurality of cooling fingers are immersed in a water-filled container. The refrigerant circulating inside the ice fingers causes the latter to be cooled down such that a layer of ice forms on the cooling fingers immersed in the water. As soon as the layer of ice on the cooling fingers has reached a usable size, it is released from the cooling fingers. A clear ice maker of this kind is described in DE 103 36 834 A1. This type of icemaker is finally available in a plurality of embodiments. Such ice makers are generally installed in the refrigeration compartment of a combined refrigerator/freezer.
The cold generator of the refrigerator generally consists of a refrigerant circuit for a refrigerant, comprising a compressor, a condenser and an evaporator which removes heat from the space to be cooled and transfers it to the refrigerant. The evaporators are generally implemented as wire tube evaporators, which means that the evaporators act as heat exchangers. They are mostly mounted horizontally inside the refrigerators. In the case of wire tube evaporators, the evaporator tube carrying the refrigerant is bent into parallel loops. The tube loops are fixed—mainly spot-welded—to wire rods and thus stabilized. The wire rods run in parallel spacings at right angles to the straight sections of the tube loops, above and below them. The purpose of connecting the refrigerant-carrying tube loops to the wire rods is, on the one hand, to prevent the tube loops from sagging and, on the other, to achieve higher cooling efficiency by increasing the surface area.
If an ice maker is provided in the refrigerator, it can be connected, for example, to the refrigerant circuit of the refrigerator. Another possibility is to equip the ice maker with a refrigerant circuit of its own and thermally couple the latter to the refrigerator's evaporator.
In order to ensure that a predefined temperature is maintained inside refrigerators, a control unit is normally provided which is connected to one or more temperature sensors and controls the cold generator accordingly. Said control units are in each case adapted to suit the type of refrigerator and may therefore be very different. If an ice maker is now to be provided for the refrigerator, complex and time-consuming adaptation work is necessary in order to enable the ice maker to be connected to the refrigerator control unit.